11–20 of 26 posts
i was the first technical employee of a now well known, but still very much young and growing startup. i predict this credential will prove more beneficial than "software engineer, google" for a number of reasons.
incidentally, i was so young and isolated when i started working for startups that i didn't realize it was taboo or scary until it was too late. i wasn't optimizing for credentials; i just needed a job man.
Are we actually going to have data for iteration #5,678,922 of this debate, or will we just play Anecdote Poker again?
Many luminaries including Peter Thiel have been saying this but I see a little bit of a contradiction while comparing their statements to their backgrounds. Peter Thiel, for example, went to Stanford undergrad and law school. Chris Dixon has an MA from Columbia. PG has a PhD from Harvard etc...I'm also wondering if the reverse is happening in the startup world where investors see you unfavorably if you're not a 19 ye…
Never mind that most of them will fail, or that they're really not remotely qualified or experienced enough to produce good work in their field of interest. The amount invested is effectively pocket change, so much so that it doesn't matter if you have a 100 failures for every Dropbox.
It's a fools game to see the VC market as anything other than just another business industry, with different set or empty credentials. They use those credentials to convince 'entrepreneurs' to make themselves into a product to be sold, for pennies on the dollar.
I grew up in Germany, went to an okay university first, then a "good" university, became a management consultant for a while, enrolled in a relatively high end business school, went to Cal to do research and finally ended up in the Bay area and went through YC a while ago.
There were very good (by some metric) people everywhere I went. I'm talking about the top of the class when I studied Math in Cologne, the 30 y/o tenured CS professor in Munich, the 22 y/o consultant who earns more than his parents etc.. Those people are often focused on achievement, grades, getting a good job, etc.
Recently, I've met a different kind of people. People that I'd consider great at what they do. The people that you can ask a stupid question and they'll give you a considerate answer, the ones that do things out of an intrinsic motivation. To find out if they want to work with you, they'll sit down with you and talk, or work a problem over. I've had to write resumes all my life and then suddenly, a few years ago I stopped maintaining one and never needed it either.
I think what I'm seeing is that at the very high end in whatever field you're in, people won't care about credentials. But unfortunately, there is a middle ground on the "slightly less high end", where it is very important. Perhaps what you can do is "keep up appearances" until you pass that stage. If there's an easy way to get credentials (i.e. I don't think I benefited a lot from any degree I have, but they were easy to get and I could do other things I liked more at the same time), go for it.
Edit: Sorry if this lacks clarity, I wrote it in a hurry. I'll come back later to edit
"But optimizing for external validation is a dangerous trap" You dont think this is strongly present in the startup world as well? In a number of ways I think many in the current form of the startup world are even more hungry for external validation but perhaps in a different way and from a different crowd. "You’re fighting over a fixed pie against well-credentialed peers." This also present in startups but instead o…
The only validation that matters for the success of your startup is validation from your customers. And the list of things customers want is endless. Reporters, investors, bloggers, commenters on HN are second order at best, and most of the time don't really matter. There's no fixed pie you're competing for in startups. If you don't believe me, try looking at which YC startups have the most "external validation" afte…
There's VC-istan and then there's the ideal of the customer-focused, lifestyle-business. I think you're conflating the two, which is not unreasonable because almost everyone does.
VC-istan is a system in which most people can't really play. You don't just decide to be a Founder and get sit-down pitches with Peter Thiel. You can't even get a real reason for a rejection (much less a decent chance at a timely acceptance) until you know people. It's an introduction-based guild system. That's probably inevitable and not the primary evil. The primary evil is that most of these VC-istan companies use "be a real founder some day" as a carrot they dangle in front of clueless 22-year-olds, who fail to realize that as subordinate engineers, they're getting absolutely no progress toward what they were promised.
VC-istan is a postmodern corporation, but it's effectively one company. The VCs talk to each other in all kinds of inappropriate ways, and they decide as a group whether you're hot (or not). If you're hot, you get the resources to hire 10 engineers. Or 25. If you're either lucky or a really good judge and hire good ones, you have a shot at something big.
"Founder" is just a mid-level PM position in VC-istan. If you're playing the VC-istan career game, you end up caring more about investors and press than customers. Why? Because you're a selfish careerist (you have to be) and your investors will continue to have influence over your success or failure at your next venture. Your customers won't.
VC-istan, for businesses, is get-big-or-die. You're competing for scarce resources, whether they be "eyeballs" or investor attention, because if you aren't growing at 100% per year, you're "walking dead", which means yesterday's dogshit. The postmodern corporation of VC-istan treats companies themselves as disposable (which isn't right or wrong, just a different approach).
What you're describing, where customers are king, is a different world: slow-growing businesses that are often decried as "lifestyle businesses", but actually comprise the silent majority of new economic activity. These firms might define success as growth at 20% per year instead of 150%. These businesses don't turn into billion-dollar concerns quickly, and they're hard to sell, but if you don't mind being there for 10+ years, they're probably a better option. You're not going to have to sell your soul to remain "in" with the VCs and cool kids, and you can set up shop in a low-COL location like Madison or Portland.
The difficulty in starting lifestyle businesses is that you have to put personal savings on the line, and our generation (as a whole) neither has that nor is likely to get there-- ever. You put a lot more on the line when you start one of those than you do when you take a check from a VC.
Additionally, the danger, and it's what gives VCs power, is that your lifestyle business ends up having to compete with a VC-funded machine-gunner.
The post from Sivers' blog[1] a few days talked optimistically about how, at least in some ways, we're beginning to see a fix for this. You can break out of the credentials trap by making and doing stuff and by looking for people who make stuff. Public creations and contributions, even as simple as blogging, are becoming much more of an accepted credential (offering more external validation in Dixon's words) and that…
We, in the HN-sphere, have this irritating tendency to take outlier successes and people as indicative. Since no social-proof system on earth (university education, or investor affirmation) can identify excellence beyond the 98th percentile or so, we assume (correctly) that those systems are functionally ineffectual, and (perhaps incorrectly) conclude that people can safely tell those systems to fuck off. Most people can't. Most people need to exploit those systems, no matter how painful the level-grinding may be, in order to get food on their tables.
I think it's ridiculous that most people spend 3 times as much time proving they're capable of doing work than actually doing it. (Most corporate work is evaluative, not functional or important. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra...) However, very few people have the power to get out of that nonsense.